News

eBay presented a keynote at Hadoop World, describing the architecture of its completely rebuilt search engine, Cassini, slated to go live in 2012. It indexes all the content and user metadata to produce better rankings and refreshes indexes hourly. It is built using Hadoop for hourly index updates and HBase to provide random access to item information.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! have decided to propose a common markup vocabulary, Schema.org, based on the Microdata format, simplifying the job of webmasters who want to give meaning to their web pages content.

After several years of development, the developers from NeoTechnology have released version 1.0 of Neo4j, a Java-based graph database which follows the property graph datamodel. InfoQ spoke with NeoTechnology COO Peter Neubauer to learn more about the current Neo4j release and what it offers to developers.

The Apache Software Foundation has released Lucene 2.9, the last minor release before 3.0. Amongst other features version 2.9 includes a number of performance improvements, and adds near real-time searching, native support for numeric range queries, and geospatial aware searching.

Developers working with Apache Search engine Lucene typically rely on using a code profiler, debugging the source code, or manually instrumenting the Lucene code to track down performance variations with their Lucene implementation. LucidGaze, a free product from Lucid Imagination, offers an alternative. InfoQ takes a look at the product and talks to Lucid Imagination to find out more.

The latest version of Hibernate Search, an open source domain model search framework from Hibernate group, supports a declarative and dynamic search analyzer model as well as indexing and query time performance improvements. Hibernate Search development team recently announced the release of Version 3.1 of the search framework. The new version also provides new features focused on usability.

The Apache Solr project, an open source enterprise search server based on Apache Lucene, recently released version 1.3. InfoQ spoke with Solr creator Yonik Seeley to learn more about this release, and also about what capabilities Solr offers to end users.

Ten years ago, relying on open source projects was unimaginable in most Windows shops. These days, .NET programmers are awakening to the world of enterprise class software developed and proven on the Java platform. Today we look at the popular Full Text search engines, Apache Lucene and Lucene.Net.

The Compass project, an open source project based on Lucene which aims to simplify the integration of search into Java applications, recently released version 2.0. InfoQ spoke with Compass founder Shay Banon to learn more about this release and about what Compass provides to the Java community.

The Apache Lucene project, a high-performance full-featured text search engine library written entirely in Java, released version 2.3 today. InfoQ spoke with committer and Project Management Committee (PMC) member Grant Ingersoll to learn more about this release and the future plans for Lucene.

Incremental search as a means to find features and functions within applications may be an emerging UI design innovation. Apple and Microsoft have recently tried it with a lot of praise from the community. Are we experiencing a paradigm shift in application navigation? Are the days of traversing a maze of menus and remembering convoluted keyboard shortcuts numbered?

Lucene Java 2.2 is now available. Lucene is a high-performance, full-featured text search engine library written entirely in Java. There are several new features in this version, and InfoQ spoke with Grant Ingersoll, a committer and Project Management Committee (PMC) member for the Lucene project, to learn more about this release.

The second beta of the new Hibernate Search project was recently released. InfoQ spoke to project lead Emmanuel Bernard to find out more. The Hibernate Search project is aimed at users of Hibernate or JPA that want to make their Hibernate/JPA-managed objects accessible via indexed, full-text search.